Earthquakes And Shake-Ups

Previously on Let Them Eat Beefcake: Fat dudes ran the show. The women won a twenty-four-hour visit from a guy so much smarter than they were that a glimmer of hope appeared that they would learn to count and tie their shoes and stuff. They also discovered as a result of their abbreviated Remedial Vanuatu 101 class (first term paper: "Please explain the advantages and disadvantages of eating your own feet") that they could split coconuts and suck sugar cane and didn't have to just keep devouring their own bitterness, resentment, and divisive jealousy. Although those are the most satisfying staples they have, and best of all -- no calories! Yasur then rolled through the immunity challenge, proving that you don't have to be competent to win, you just have to be less incompetent. Although Brady tried to crack the alliance of five men that had previously booted two of his stud-y buddies, he had no luck, and found himself the prettiest boy yet to ride the bus to the Land of Nice Boys Who Don't Even Make It To The Jury And Have To Sit In The Back Row At The Reunion Show.

Credits. You know, the pictures going by only make me more depressed about Brady. I know it's shallow of me. I should be punished. Like...arrested and aggressively questioned by the FBI would be good.

Volcano! And...is that a bat hanging upside down again? It looks like a bat in a Hefty bag. Clearly, my knowledge of bats is not what it should be. That's a deficiency I'll have to correct, what with Halloween coming up. It is the morning of Day 11 at Lopevi, and John is spitting a seed out of his mouth. That's how you can tell there are no chicks around. If John were trying to bag a chick, he certainly wouldn't be spitting for distance. There is tension in the camp, however, because there is an issue on the rapidly shrinking table. Specifically, Chad and his nicely-constructed shoulders want to talk about where everybody sleeps. (Totally unrelated aside by which I mean nothing untoward, of course -- Dear Chad: to me is open. Signed, Miss A.) Sarge -- who apparently sleeps in the shelter himself but nevertheless thinks he might be able to help mediate -- takes over the discussion and breaks it to Bubba that some of the guys aren't happy that he sacks out in the same spot by the fire every night. "Well, they can build a bridge and get over it," Bubba says, showing the kind of cooperative Dixie spirit that got Atlanta burned to a charred husk. Sarge insists that this attitude is inappropriate, because nobody came here to be an individual; they came here to be a team. And normally, I don't contradict men named after military ranks, but that is so precisely the opposite of true that it's hard not to make an exception long enough to say: Huh? (I am still totally distracted by Chad's shoulders, incidentally, so I apologize if I miss anything.)

Anyway, Bubba wants to know, if Chad has a problem with where Bubba's been sleeping, why Chad didn't just sack up in a manly fashion and say something, rather than going to Sarge like he's a camp counselor. And in theory, I agree, but in practice, I don't know if that would have worked any better. Furthermore, I think Chad wanted to present it as a tribe-management issue, not his personal beef about wanting to sleep in a better spot. This is basically what Chad says -- that he wasn't the only person who was irritated about the sleeping positions. In interviews, Bubba rejects the entire idea that it makes any difference what spot you sleep in, but Chad clarifies that the wind comes the same way most of the time, so if you sleep to the bad side of the fire, you get smoke and ash blowing on you all night long. Chad adds that Bubba got stubborn about it and was not going to give up the prime spot. Obviously, if Bubba really believed what he's saying and he thought it didn't matter, he'd just say, "Oh, I had no idea you cared. Sure, we'll rotate." I mean, he'd say it more like, "I's jes sat down 'ere cuz'n I dun wun fubba holla tem lack-ree mush," but it would mean the same thing. But he doesn't say that, because he doesn't want smoke in his face all night. Instead, he goes into a huffy, passive-aggressive "Fine, then, I won't even sleep around the fire" thing, and you can just see that his constitution and his attitude are going downhill in a hurry. Bubba interviews that, indeed, he's "getting kind of tired of hanging out with these men. It's so lonely." I'm thinking he's really not cut out for this, because...it's Day 11, dude. I shared a cabin with twits for longer than that at summer camp when I was nine. You'll live. And...does he have any other clothes besides the Bob Barker shirt? Because...I suspect that thing is about ready to get up and spin the big wheel on its own, if you get my drift.

Later, the team spots two gentlemen approaching their beach in a boat. Bubba's response is, "Guhn have visitors uhn bay skape." Or something. I would request more yellow letters to caption Bubba, please; he's single-handedly wearing out the TiVo's poor eight-second replay button. As Rory explains, having two guys come to visit was exciting because the men of Lopevi are all sick of looking at each other's mugs, and furthermore, the guys appeared to be locals, and the teams haven't had much contact with the Vanuatuans so far. A man in elaborate garb gets out of the canoe and summons the men, speaking some language other than English. The men gather around. As he talks to them, they can't make out much, except that at one point, he says, "One chief." They eventually figure out from this that he wants them to pick a leader. The men, of course, can only pick Sarge, so, figuring that he has to go with them, he starts taking off his pants and shoes and such. As leaders do. Embarrassingly enough, however, he's not going anywhere, and all the guy wants to do is give him a staff and a medallion. Boy, I hate it when you take your pants off and it turns out you've misinterpreted your companion's intentions, don't you? I generally favor going out a bathroom window, but the canoe guys get back in the boat and leave. "And we're like, 'I guess I'm not goin' with them,'" Sarge says. Yeah. I guess not. Bringing a new and more literal meaning to the words, "Keep your pants on, Sarge."

Volcano! Suddenly, it is night, and it is time for tribal council. Yasur comes tromping up to the fire. They sit down, and Jeff asks Lisa whether, in light of how long the teams remained divided along gender lines, this is actually one tribe now. She tries to be polite, talking about how they tried to welcome the guys to the tribe, and how "it feels like they've been with [Yasur] forever." Well, except for the part where there was all the predestined plotting against them. But other than that, it's definitely all one tribe now. Jeff asks Leann whether she's really accustomed herself to the new tribes, or whether it's still boys against girls in her mind. Leann cuts right to the chase, and admits that, to her, it's still boys against girls. As it has been since second grade, so shall it ever be.

Asked the same thing, Ami gives the biggest bullshit answer ever, saying that "this morning, [she] thought [they] were all one team." As stated previously, bullshit! She didn't even want to give them coconut advice, and she said from the beginning that it was still the five women together. Grrrr. I hate people who try to convince you they're taking the high road by trampling a lot of other people. She gives her big BS explanation of why she knew that Bubba's horrible betrayal meant they were "not a team," blah dee blah. Needs. To. Shut. Up. Bubba explains exactly what he wanted, which was to convince the other team to drop the challenge. "We had all intentions on winning," Leann snots, apparently offended that Bubba feared they couldn't win on their own, which would be a lot more convincingly indignant if they hadn't already lost, so what the fuck? And then Ami throws in that they weren't going to get rid of Bubba anyway. Rory makes a face like, "Yeah, thanks for that." And honestly, Ami, who are the "we" who weren't going to get rid of "you" if it's all one team? What Bubba was doing was definitely a move against the women on an individual level, given that it addressed post-merge strategy, but it was not in any way a move against his team on a team level, as it would have been if he'd offered to throw the challenge, know what I mean? Their whole argument on this point is so without merit that you feel like if they had given it fifteen seconds of thought, the women would have figured that out, even though they're really not that bright. Asked whether he's nervous, Rory flatly says that the only thing that was going to change the fact that he or Bubba was going to get canned would have been winning the challenge, because the women never had any intention of allowing them to disrupt the preexisting alliance. Well, at least he's straightforward.

I realize I am way too annoyed by these people this week. I guess this was the week I realized that this is the year you learn what would happen if people actually played the game intelligently rather than switching alliances and taking out personal grudges and stuff. This year, both tribes formed bare-majority alliances, which have stayed together and are slowly plucking the excess people off one by one. For the most part, nothing has changed, no one has changed strategy, no one has allowed any personal problems to cloud his or her judgment...and it's the right way to play. All of the majority-alliance people are playing exactly the right way to get to the merge, and in all likelihood, once they merge, whichever of those alliances has more people will just pluck off the other alliance one person at a time. I mean, after this episode, there are twelve people left, and you're literally not going to see anything interesting until it gets down to about five. I don't know what the answer is in future seasons, but I'm not sure the problem this season is anything more complicated than the fact that, after nine seasons, people have finally figured out how to play, and we've essentially returned to a very elemental version of the game: form alliance, keep alliance, pay no attention to anything that happens, vote according to alliance. And the major opportunity to disrupt it was missed because of the stupid way they mixed the teams. So you can pick on the casting or whatever, but I'm not sure anymore that it's anybody's fault that the show is so boring. I guess you could argue that the people on the outside of the alliances aren't doing very much to change their fates, but could they, really? Anyway. So I'm reduced to being irritated by hypocrisy, not that I'm not usually.